The Night Mover
by Mickey Fisher
Morgan Vanatta wasn’t a magician but he did make people disappear for a living.
Wednesday afternoon he was on the clock, sitting in the corner booth of a joint called Robo Ramen, back to the wall, eyes on the door. Just like Wild Bill Hickock used to do it until one day that particular seat was taken and a guy named Jack McCall shot him in the back.
According to the website people enjoy the spicy tonkotsu so that’s what he ordered (side of gyoza) even though he wasn’t all that hungry. The people of San Gabriel Valley passed by out the window and he made a mental note of each one in between eavesdropping on the cell phone conversation happening in the booth to his left. He couldn’t see the woman but he could hear her just fine. Fighting with a medical debt collector over her mother’s hospital bills.
Outside the window: Armenian Guy In Black Track Suit.
“Just give me the total.”
Old Lady With Poodle.
“I’ll have it for you on Monday, will you please just please give her the treatment today?”
Shortly after the woman left he settled up with the server-bot and grabbed the last gyoza barehanded to go. He took a bite on the way out the door and it exploded, shooting molten hot lava down his shirt.
He carried a spare in the old days. Bonnie used to make fun of him, heading out for work in the morning with coffee in one hand and a backup shirt on a hangar in the other. He only ever needed it once but he was glad he had it when he did. The blood wasn’t his but he wouldn’t have wanted to spend the day looking at it, regardless.
He threw a navy tanker jacket over the stained shirt and got back in the car, just in time to get an AQI alert on his phone. Wild fires in Ventura coupled with the Santa Ana winds causing dangerous PM2.5 levels. New York was drowning, there were supercell storms in Oklahoma, and California was burning. The “hundred year fires” came every year now. The shelter in place drills were supposed to keep people off the streets for a few hours to wait out the worst of the particulates but the majority of people strapped on the filter masks and went about their business.
Morgan didn’t mind waiting today. He had a couple of hours to kill and he wasn’t far from Walt’s, one of the few places in town with old school electro-mechanical pinball machines. They were loud and tactile and so much more satisfying than the virtual pins at the hipster joints. If he slapped the flippers hard enough it would cause the ball to skip off the playfield and smack the glass. You didn’t get that same action with 1’s and 0’s.
The Mind Cop machine was near the window so he could still keep an eye on the street. Not that he was paranoid but some habits are hard to break, and there might still be some blowback from the Hungarian incident a couple of weeks ago.
The current office was out in Sun Valley, tucked between an auto garage and a tool and dye shop, unremarkable but for a small holo-logo and a buzzer near the door. Morgan arrived exactly on time for his appointment, pressed the buzzer and looked up so the CCTV could read his face. One of the only cameras he willingly allowed to do that. When he heard the click he pulled open the heavy secured door, stepped inside, and waited for it click again behind him.
In the plexiglass vestibule he handed over his keys, phone, and watch to a twenty-something woman with a buzzcut and a camo jacket. Her name was Eva and occasionally she gave him a thumb drive filled with a curated selection of music from around the world. Last week it was “Brazilian Bossa Jazz.” He dug it because he could enjoy the vibe without his brain getting caught up in the lyrics.
Eva handed him a new one today. “Congolese Rhumba.”
Morgan said, “I never would have guessed they did the rhumba in the Congo.”
“You learn something new every day.”
“Not at my age.”
Eva said, “They’re inside,” and buzzed him through the next secured door.
He stepped into a dimly lit space with the freestanding cube made of chain link fence in the center. A Faraday Cage, the walls lined with mesh and foil to block electronic eavesdropping. A sign read “No electronic devices permitted inside.”
It made the clients more comfortable.
Him too, if he was being honest.
Inside the cage there was a seating area with leather furniture, a couple of thrift store coffee tables, a Persian rug, and some candles. No electric lights.
The man in the wheelchair was Oliver Preswick, the founder of Lighthouse. In his late sixties, sporting a long grey pony tail and a Hawaiian shirt that made him look more like an aging surfer than a theoretical physicist. In the chair next to Ollie was a woman he introduced as “The Client.”
Ollie introduced Morgan in turn as “The Driver.”
Ollie was the only one who knew his real name.
Morgan took a seat and listened to Ollie go over the instructions. The Client was in her mid-thirties. Dressed like the agent who sold him the bungalow in Sierra Madre. She had money. Most of the Clients did, although Lighthouse did a fair amount of pro bono.
Ollie said, “The Driver will take you to the waypoint, an hour and twenty minutes outside of the city. No stops, so you need to have the one bag you’re going take with you when he picks you up. Come having had your dinner and gone to the restroom. Do you understand?”
The Client nodded.
“When you reach the waypoint, you’ll transfer the crypto to the account I gave you,” When I see that it’s in the account he’ll call for your pickup.”
Ollie paused to lend gravity to the next bit. “We’ve gone over this before but I just want to make it very clear, one last time. At any point along the way, up until the transfer, you can call the whole thing off. After that, it’s out of our hands. It won’t be impossible to come back but it will be very, very difficult.”
The Client stared at Ollie, unblinking, and said, “There’s nothing left for me here.”
They all had a different story but the ending was the same. They were ready to pay top dollar to vanish from a world where that’s become nearly impossible to do.
Last year, the globe passed the one billion mark for surveillance cameras. We carried smart phones in our pockets that law enforcement used to retrace our movements all over the world. We held conversations in earshot of our laptops and electronic home assistants and watched as ads popped up on our social media feeds to sell us goods and services based on those conversations. Every movement we made, every thought we posted, every picture we took of an artfully crafted latte was studied by some algorithm, mining us for data so that one company or another could in turn mine us for money.
“Data was the new oil” and our collective daily experience was a boomtown.
As time went on there were fewer and fewer places a person could go where they were truly “off the grid,” where they could disappear for good.
Ollie knew of just such a place and he could get you there.
For a price.
***
Morgan started working for Lighthouse a year after the accident.
He only knew the details from reading the report. A driverless delivery cube, hacked by a couple of bored teenagers. They had essentially created a life-sized, three dimensional street racing game they could play from the comfort and safety of their homes. It sped through an intersection and blindsided Morgan’s sedan. Luckily, he was the only occupant.
The blackouts started a few weeks after.
Followed by the dissociative disorder.
He saw strangers in the alleyways. Behind the columns in parking garages. They were watching his every move. They sent messages only he could hear, told him they were the only people he could trust. He was afraid to tell Bonnie so he shut her out. He was isolated and alone except for a few meetings he attended of a support group for extreme paranoiacs.
One night, after a particularly bad blackout, he found himself standing in his downstairs hallway.
It was really late.
Or maybe it was really early, it was hard to tell.
He stood there for a moment, trying to remember what he came down there for.
That’s when he heard the noise and remembered — there was a stranger in the kitchen.
He moved quietly to the den, where he kept the gun case in the closet.
The case opened with a bio-metric scan of his forefinger. He took out the 9mm with the DNA safe-lock. He tapped his index finger to the print-scan and the gun vibrated once in his hand, recognizing him as the owner. His heart pounded in his ears as he took a step toward the doorway.
The stranger was standing in the kitchen window.
He curled his finger around the trigger and took a step forward. The hardwood creaked. When the stranger saw the gun aimed at her chest she dropped a glass that shattered on the tile floor.
She said, “Morgan… it’s me. It’s Bonnie.”
As far as he knew he’d never seen this woman before in his life. His training kicked in and he told her to get on the floor and put her hands behind her back.
She begged him to listen to her. Told him, “You’re having an episode. You lost time, because of the accident, remember?”
“I said get on the ground.”
“Please, put down the gun and listen to me.”
She took a step toward him and he started to squeeze the trigger. Just as he was about to cross that eighth of an inch space between the living and the dead, he heard a tiny voice in the hallway behind him.
“Dad?”
Morgan turned around and saw her standing there in her pink pajamas. Holding her mermaid blanket. Sleepy-eyed and confused.
Then, it all came flooding back.
His daughter. Livvy.
Bonnie said, “Please don’t hurt her.”
The ground opened up beneath his feet and swallowed the perfect life they’d built together. The perfect midcentury modern they’d restored. The perfect kid they’d loved into existence. All of it was cast into the void in that instant.
Before that night, Morgan divided up his time on Earth into neat little chapters. Childhood. High School. College. Police Academy. FBI. Bonnie. Marriage. Livvy. Promotion. Then —
Accident.
Recovery.
Paranoia.
The night he nearly lost everything.
Doctors finally discovered the root of his problem. A lesion on his brain, a latent side effect from the accident. When they took it out the blackouts and dissociative disorder stopped altogether. The wraiths and spectral figures lingering in the margins of Morgan’s life went away. The voices in his head stopped talking.
But, the damage had already been done.
He and Bonnie split up. They still had a good relationship, and he got along fine with her new husband, Kevin. But, he never fully trusted himself to be alone with Livvy again. Bonnie’s usually nearby when they see each other. Just in case.
He left his job at the bureau and started teaching classes for a private investigator school in Glendale, in a strip mall next to an El Pollo Loco.
Ollie came to see him one night after class. Morgan recognized him from the support group. He had been an empathetic presence, the first to offer a kind word or reassurance. Now he was here, asking Morgan if he could buy him a drink.
Over Mai Tai’s at an old school Tiki steakhouse on Brand he asked Morgan, “Do you enjoy teaching?”
Morgan contemplated lying then decided there wasn’t any point. “Not particularly, no.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Because I can’t make a living playing pinball.”
Ollie gave him the courtesy of a performative chuckle. So Morgan gave him the courtesy of an honest answer. “I had some money from the settlement but I used it to pay off the house for my ex-wife and kid. Put the rest on a down payment for the new place. I teach because I need the money.”
“What if you could make a lot more doing something else?”
“Like what?”
“Night mover.”
The next twenty minutes turned everything Morgan knew about the world upside down.
Ollie explained that back in the mid-1960’s there was an accident at a particle collider in Berkeley that created a separate dimension running parallel to our own. The powers that be managed to keep the accident a secret until the late 90’s, when Ollie was doing a research project for Cal Tech in the field of Multi-Dimensional Theory.
One night in the high desert he intercepted a radio broadcast that didn’t appear to emanate from any physical source in our world, not to mention it was playing a commercial for a drive-in movie that had never been made. Tapping into that signal, Ollie discovered that not only did this other dimension exist, it had been steadily deviating from our own for nearly thirty years.
Before he could present his findings his research was confiscated by the Defense Department’s Multi-Dimensional Theory Division. They branded him a crackpot, drummed him out of school, and buried his research in a vault in D.C., never to be seen again.
But, Ollie was undeterred.
In exile he created a technology that could trigger a “confluence event” where the two realities briefly intersected, allowing temporary access to either side. Innovation is expensive, so he set about funding his further exploration into the deep structure of spacetime by offering a service he called “transference.”
“Anyone born after 1970 is eligible because there’s very little risk of running into your alternate self on the other side. A person can start over there with a new identity, free from whatever threat or worry is bearing down on them in this reality. They can create the life they want instead of the one they’ve got here.”
Over time, word started to spread and the work got more dangerous. There was a burgeoning black market for stolen tech and Ollie found himself targeted by people looking to start their own moving company and governments looking to exploit it for strategic advantage. It was getting harder to vet potential clients, plan the pickups and drop offs and stay one step ahead of the wolves at the door.
Morgan asked, “Why me?”
“You worked in law enforcement. I imagine you can handle yourself in tight situations. You’ve dealt with people from all walks of life. You know how to read them. You have no augmentations, so you can’t be hacked or tracked.”
After the breakdown, Morgan cut the umbilical cord to technology. It wasn’t like he was some kind of Neo-Luddite, or God forbid one of those creepy doomsday Days of Noh motherfuckers. But letting go of his need for interconnectivity gave him a little peace of mind. Not to mention he could drive a stick and read a map while a lot of other men his age were content to let computers do the heavy lifting. It was something of a badge of pride at this point.
Ollie closed his pitch by saying, “The most important thing to me is that you know what it feels like.”
“To do what?”
“To be hunted.”
“I wasn’t being hunted.”
“You didn’t know that at the time. I need someone who will treat my clients with empathy and dignity.”
Morgan still wasn’t convinced. Then Ollie told him how much he was willing to pay and Morgan remembered how the smell of rotisserie chicken made him nauseous at this point.
In the two years since Morgan helped a dozen clients through transference.
The first was a young wife on the run from an ex-husband who happened to be special forces.
There was the drug mule whose testimony put a cartel boss in prison for life.
There was a cleric on the verge of extradition back to Turkey where he was certainly going to face torture and execution. Morgan kept him on the move for forty-eight hours, evading CIA and contract killers from Ankara.
Then there was the Hungarian incident.
He enjoyed the work but he enjoyed the camaraderie even more. It had been a while since he felt a genuine connection with other people. It was a hard thing to do if you weren’t plugged in like everybody else. The music mixes from Eva, the after work Mai Tai’s with Ollie, the occasional conversations with the clients, all of that made him feel a little bit less like a relic on the road to obsolescence.
***
It was early evening and Morgan’s 91 GMC Typhoon was cruising through the Mojave Desert toward Zzyzx. Keeping it running was a pain in the ass but he liked the power and anything that old didn’t come with an auto-pilot function or computer to hack.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. By taking the job, Morgan chose to live with a low level hum of paranoia all over again. The upshot was that he developed a number of habits in his “targeted” days that came in handy in his work for Lighthouse. Like sweeping his car for tracking devices and doing a little extra background work on his clients. It meant that he kept a fair number of secrets from Ollie but everybody has secrets.
Ollie, too.
The Client hadn’t said a word since leaving LA.
That was typical. It was either nervous silence or nervous chatter. Morgan rolled with it either way and did his best to put them at ease. He’d be nervous too if he was about to leave everything he’d ever known behind.
After an hour, she said, “That’s stunning.”
She was looking out the window at the streaks of orange and purple in the sky and how the setting sun turned the sand into gold. He took it for granted because he’d been out here so many times. Hell, he was out here yesterday and didn’t notice the sunset at all.
She said, “Tell me the truth. What’s it really like over there?”
“For a while, we were on similar tracks. That all changed over there in 67. There was a white train, what they used to call the railcars that kept the thermonuclear warheads moving around the country. One of them derailed near Evansville, Indiana. Triggered a series of explosions that killed nearly half the population there.”
“Jesus. So what, it’s like some fucking post-apocalyptic wasteland?”
“Quite the opposite. After that, we kind of soured on the whole idea of living on the brink of mutual destruction. So, the US made a push to deescalate tensions with the Soviets. The Cold War ended twenty-five years earlier and the trillions of dollars that would have been spent on new tech for the military was put into stuff like critical infrastructure.”
“If you tell me they’ve had jet packs all this time I’m gonna be pissed.”
“There aren’t any jet packs. There wasn’t even a space race.”
“Because it was all driven by that competition with the Russians.”
“Exactly. They do have other cool stuff. Wireless electricity, remote transmission of solar power, that sort of thing. Which means no rising sea levels or hundred year storms every year.”
“So you like it over there.”
“I’ve never been, to be honest.”
Ollie offered to let him see it but there was still a certain degree of risk when it came to getting back safely. He didn’t want to take a chance on not being here for Livvy. He was curious to know if he existed over there since his parents met in 84 and he was born in 88, years after the branching incident. He asked The Contact on the other side to look him up, and it turns out he didn’t exist over there. In fact, his parents never met in that reality.
He thought about that a lot.
Probably too much.
We’re all the eventual product of a seemingly infinite number of possible combinations of atoms. One little deviation along the way and we simply do not exist. It was a thought that was at once both liberating and terrifying.
There was one thing that gave him comfort.
The Contact told him that his mother was still alive on the other side. She never developed Leukemia and was living a long and happy life.
The Contact gave Morgan a snapshot of her that he kept on the mirror in his bedroom.
He didn’t mention any of this to The Client.
Instead, he told her, “At some point I’ll go over. But when I do it’ll be for good.”
***
Morgan pulled onto the fire road and climbed a bit until the Typhoon reached a plateau that gave him a view of the desert floor. Night was falling and it was just about time. The kit works best at night, in places with the least electromagnetic interference.
The Client looked down at the valley floor.
“Is this it?” she asked.
“We have to walk a bit from here.”
He grabbed the Pelican case from the back of the truck and told her to follow him.
She hesitated.
Morgan said, “If you’re having second thoughts, you can still change your mind.”
“How do I know you’re not going to just kill me out there?”
This was typical and again, perfectly understandable. They’ve left everything behind except the clothes on their backs and one small bag or suitcase. Morgan used an EMP gun to fry the circuits of any augmentations under the skin, leaving their bodies untraceable. They put tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on a down payment, an equal amount in crypto, ready to transfer in a few swipes on a tablet. Who’s to say Morgan wasn’t just going to plug them and leave them in the middle of bumfuck nowhere as a feast for the coyotes?
He’d be wondering the exact same thing.
He pulled up his shirt to show her his waistband and turned to show her his back. He hadn’t touched a gun since that night in his hallway and he never would. “See? Unarmed.”
The Client asked, “What’s in the case?”
“The confluence kit and the tablet you’re going to use to transfer the crypto.”
No sooner had he said this than his phone buzzed in his pocket. Notification from the motion sensors he pre-set at the turnoff last night.
Company was on the way. Four vehicles.
He looked down in the valley floor but he couldn’t see them, which meant their headlights were off. Probably using infra-red to avoid being seen.
Now he knew he was in trouble and wondered where the hell he slipped up.
He had searched The Client and her bag for anything that could possibly be tracked. He swept the car for transponders. He hadn’t activated the tablet yet, and nobody else knew about the phone or the sensors. If somebody followed him, they would have had to trace something on his person, but the only thing other than his wallet, phone, and keys was —
Congolese Rhumba.
Eva gave him a thumb drive earlier. She’d been giving them to him for months, setting him up for this very moment. When he got in the car, he tossed it into the console to listen to on the drive back. Didn’t even give it a second thought.
Whoever she was working with was gonna be here in less than three minutes.
There was only question left.
Was The Client working for them, too?
Maybe she wasn’t really nervous. Maybe she was asking him questions to stall for time.
He kept his cool, told her, “If you’re still worried, I’ll show you what’s inside the case.”
Morgan flipped it open to show her the black box and tablet inside. He couldn’t explain what it actually did if she wanted him to, but he could give her a quick demonstration of the basics. He flipped the switches in sequence and tapped a couple of commands on the LED.
“Look there,” he said and pointed.
The atmosphere behind her started to ripple. It was dazzling in the setting sun. A tiny nebula unfurling in the air, just a few feet away from her. Two realities were converging on one another, creating a temporary rift in the shared space.
Two minutes until the convoy arrived.
“It’s beautiful.“ She stared at it, distracted.
It was the perfect time to ask.
“Are they giving you the money to pay your mom’s hospital bills?”
The Client’s head snapped in his direction, eyes wide with surprise. How did he know?
Trust is a work in progress and sometimes it paid to be a little paranoid in this world. That’s why he did the extra vetting at Robo Ramen.
Before he could say anything else, The Client slammed a foot into his chest, knocking him flat on his back.
She was clearly a professional, clearly on the other team.
In half a second she was on top of him, raining down blows on his face. Adrenaline racing he bucked her off with his hips and scrambled to his feet. She came up and squared off, ready for round two.
Morgan knew he was about to get his ass handed to him. In a little more than a minute, there would be four vehicles arriving with heavily armed backup. He was a dead man if this went on much longer.
Summoning all of his adrenaline, Morgan charged her with his shoulder, coming up from underneath like a defensive lineman. He launched her backwards through the confluence and just like that, she disappeared.
Abracadabra.
***
He made two calls as he was rumbling back across the valley floor.
The first was to Ollie, to let him know about Eva. They would have to burn the Sun Valley office and revoke her access to everything, immediately.
Second call was to The Contact on the other side, to let him know the pickup was cancelled. There would be no new identity waiting for The Client. She was on her own now.
It wouldn’t be impossible to come back.
But, it would be very, very difficult.
